Since the introduction of the breathalyser in 1967, much of the uncertainty surrounding the roadside detection of alcohol abuse has been removed.
No such equivalent test, however, exists for intoxicating drugs, including narcotics, in particular for the roadside detection of narcotics in saliva or other bodily fluids. In the United Kingdom, it is a criminal offence to be unfit to drive through drugs when driving or attempting to do so. The drugs in this connection need not be illegal per se to fall within the ambit of this provision. Many prescription and over the counter medications are known to cause intoxication and are provided with instructions warning against driving or operating machinery after consumption.
Police have to depend entirely on subjective behavioural impressions of suspects when deciding whether or not to make an arrest on the basis of intoxication from drugs, including narcotics. The police therefore require a presumptive test for intoxicating drugs, including narcotics, that can be deployed by front-line officers without a requirement for any special training or qualifications.
What the police urgently require is a cheap presumptive indicator of likely intoxication with drugs other than alcohol, which is simple enough for front-line officers to use in the street or at the roadside, allowing full quantitative drug identification to be subsequently carried out in more detail in police laboratories.
Mobile devices for the testing of saliva for drugs do exist but none has yet become widely used, especially by front-line officers. The main reason for this is that all of the current mobile testing methods are based upon monoclonal antibody or immunosensor technology, which is expensive. Within this technology, separate monoclonal antibodies need to be synthesised for each target substance. These cannot be made cheaply. In some cases the immunochromatic signal a generated requires analysis using an expensive electronic device. On a practical level, this technology is currently too expensive to be installed in fleets of patrol cars. Even when electronic reading devices are eliminated and one is simply looking for a colour change on a test stick, there remains an intractably high “cost per test” of around US $20. Using this type of technology on a busy night a single police patrol could spend several hundred pounds on tests.
In addition, electronic monoclonal antibody or immunosensor technologies require the user to handle either sophisticated equipment involving complex keypad input, or a variety of test sticks and strips to cover the range of possible narcotics.
Additionally, these systems can take up to 5 minutes to produce a result.
On a practical level this renders the technology too complicated and time-consuming for use by front-line officers in the street.
The addition of intoxicating drugs, including narcotics, to a person's drink—in order to incapacitate them to facilitate theft or a sexual offense—is of increasing concern. Currently available detection technology is far too expensive and limited in its scope to adequately address this problem.
Similar monoclonal antibody technology to that described above has been applied in the detection of drinks “spiked” with narcotics. However, the roadside monoclonal antibody-based detection apparatus, the costs involved with this technology are high, of the order of £4.99 for 2 testing cards. This high cost is likely to restrict its widespread use.
Furthermore, each card can currently only test for 2 narcotics—gammahydroxybutyrate and ketamine. It cannot detect diphenhydramine.
The present invention addresses one or more of the above-described disadvantages in the art.